Friday, June 28, 2013

[Sam] Dice Defense

Hello, I am Sam Donow, a rising sophomore at Williams College working with Morgan over the Summer in the Graphics Lab.

I just made up the name of the game now for the purposes of writing this blog post, but it seems good enough that I might keep it - this is a good start, I never did think of a name for my last game jam game.

This will be my third game jam - the first I did not win after not making anything successfully, although I did succeed in making a game last time, even though I really didn't have much of an idea for what I wanted to do for the game until I was about 24 hours into making it. This time I have an idea - it might not be the most novel idea in the world, but it involves combining two little games that I enjoy into something that will hopefully be fun.

The idea for this game comes from mixing two flash games that I used to enjoy playing (well, one a game, one a genre) - one is Dice Wars, a game based on risk, but where the entire game state are dice, and you fight by rolling all of your dice against an adjacent square's dice and if you win you conquer them and move over there.

The plan is to combine this probabilistic / entirely dice-based state concept with a genre of game that I personally tend to enjoy playing, tower defenses - a genre of which there exist an abundance of games, but oh well - ever since I started playing them I thought it would be a fun project to try to make one some day, so I guess I will take this as my chance.

The last game jam I used just plain old javascript, but this game jam I think I will try using codeheart.js, as it seems like it might make things a little bit easier, especially if I choose to add some highly complex graphics to this game like dice (to contrast with my last game jam game, where a square tried to avoid smaller squares in caves that were drawn using lines of lengths based on random functions convolved with themselves).

So far, I have more of a fleshed-out idea than I have had going into any other game jam, and also it seems like I might be finally choosing a more appropriate platform, and I look forward to possible success, and seeing the successes of everyone else's interesting-looking games.